Absolution
by mandrakes
Summary: Oneshot. A look at Steve Leopard's life and final moments through a sympathetic eye. A first story; reviews are adored! renamed


**SPOILERS: Books 1-12SPOILERS: Books 1-12**

Contains character death, and mild gore.

Nothing else extravagant… maybe language.

Sorry if it's at all short.

I can't say I very much like Steve particularly, but I admire certain qualities in him very much. Yet, I pity the blindness he grew up with and the loneliness that Darren must have left him with. After all, we all have the potential to do stupid/cruel things, whether we believe that we were in the right or not; it makes even less sense to completely condemn someone who believes that they were acting in the right. Hence, I challenge anyone who immediately hates Mr. Leopard to try and see things from his point of view. Life revolves almost completely around each individual's perception.

Anyway, hopefully this little work of creative writing isn't too horrible. It's my very first, so any reviews (I'd rather not have to tolerate flaming at the moment, due to a current real-world upset, thank you! 3) I receive will absolutely make my day, and hopefully help me improve. 3

Ciao, Mandrake

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With a soul like broken glass and twisted metal that shattered and melted away at the very last moment, Steve Leonard was always inescapably alone.

As a child he had friends (and as an adult, a cult following of the brother-creatures who stalked the night as tigers in a plastic and concrete forest) but steel walls encircled his mind even as his empathy fought against them. Understanding and sympathy assaulted them in wave after frothing wave until it's sea calmed and evaporated. The child's knowledge of the world grew, and a friend – his friend, his very best – left him at a distant, muggy crossroad and turned his back on him. He watched speechlessly while anger licked at his gut, and churned up a rage that even he had never expected to feel.

Every injustice ever done to him and all the self-doubt reared like an angry snake; ready to strike anything that came close enough to sink its fangs into. Fate had conspired against him, and it was in his soul to bare his teeth and fight back – consequences be damned. And the boy did fight back; he grew and adapted as he stalwartly worked toward his goal and his justice.

It was never more than that – at least, that was what he told himself.

He desired due payment for his suffering.

It had not been he who threw the first stone.

He sought out all that he needed; from allies to power, to all the weapons he could ever want and all the space he needed to store them it, regardless of the lack of a pleasant view. The boy (now a man) wielded nigh limitless control over the ignorant populace that lived below the warring factions that made up his turbulent world. Steve Leopard was as multifaceted as the universe, and the miasma of complexity he radiated bewildered many and intimidated all.

Perhaps, if things had been different, he would have shown mercy. He might have fought the rush of carnage and seen the truth - and his strongest imperfection and greatest flaw. His universe was a singular thing, a self-centered existence where others revolved around him and were pulled in by the gravity the austerely oiled mechanisms that worked in his mind exuded. He knew pain, but pain was his and no one else's; to him, the rest of the world was a sham, operated by a million little feeling-devoid strings. They were the reaction and he the action. When he was asleep they no longer existed, and when he was gone their purpose would have been served, and they would fall to dust with his last breath.

He was the vision of a narcissist, so self-consumed, quietly plotting against all odds to make everything become something of his own - while remaining blind to the reality of the world and his importance in it. Resisting him was futile, was unacceptable; a difference of opinion or dissimilarity led to expulsion from his world. Freedom was an afterthought; allegiance and blood were the foremost. There would be no treaties, nothing that would interfere with his flawless world. Why should he show compassion to those who did not recognize the value of his plans? Without a second thought any opponents were crushed beneath his boot, no more than insects crawling over his campaign against the planet.

Focused only on his desires and opinions, he was blind to the rest of the world and unable to distract himself from what he promised that night behind the gravestones; he simply could not forget. His essence – so volatile and wild, composed of flashing wild eyes and unsheathed claws – had long since taken the place of his empathy and it screamed for revenge, biting at his chest as it urged him forward. Whispered words graced his ears at night, painting a blood red dream where he ruled to the utmost recesses, from the very deepest cracks in the caverns to the atmosphere that made up the golden horizon. Toss and turn as he might, the thirst was there - and until he won the war it would not be replete.

His sights were always set on destruction and there was no way to turn him from his path. His night-bound brothers, his guardians, his advisors – all feared his hand and his mind, so prone to lapses in judgment and quick to strike out of the slightest whim or even more penetratingly - our of necessity. Still, he was their leader and their charge, so he was never dragged from his pedestal and put in his place. He never experienced a punishing blow or a harsh word. No, they allowed his self-centric universe to expand limitlessly; even until it had grown so much that it inevitably collapsed back into itself in his final moments. He had seen the truth as not as night and day but as a mixture, dawn and dusk mixing into a potent brew of points of view and the inescapable truth.

He knew the moment the words came out of fates mouth – he knew and would never, ever forget – that he had been misled, a pawn until the very end. The Lord of the Vampaneze could feel as his resolve broke past the steadfast dam and flooded for a singular second as he fought for the thing he had never had - a father - and the emotion that he had felt so sparingly in his childhood; simple love. At the reply any will to live was dragged away with the ebbing tide of tenacity until he was nothing but a little boy again. His mind and body were limp with shock and shivering with the pain of his impending demise and all that he had done wrong. He looked back on himself in seconds and felt revulsion – but for the first time in years he could identify with that faceless, cruel person. Empathy had returned.

Then – cruelly, from his friend and his brother, the man he gazed listlessly onto as he lay dying beneath him – came the ferocious lie. His rage was rekindled – alongside it a fear of what he knew he was about to do - and he struck frantically with all the energy that he had left, feeling victory in the form of a warm rush (blood that was not his own and his own at the same time) of liquid dripping over his stomach and down his side. His once sharp vision was dimming and wavering, the darkness growing and seeping in through the cracks in his mind. It struck him suddenly that he could no longer feel the agony, although he could still see the knife protruding from his chest like the wooden stakes he had sought so covetously as a child. Even words no longer had meaning, as he listened to the hiccupping speech of his spiteful brother and hysterically attempted to wield the blade further. Suddenly the world was spinning and the knife handle jammed up into his chest even deeper; had he any voice left, he would have shrieked with pain. Anger faded and grew without a pattern as his cognitive powers faded further into the murkiness invading his mind and he struck the water, clutching the sleeves of his brother ever so weakly as though somehow this could save him.

The world had never been fair to him, his predestination the most malicious jibe of all. It was conceivable that he could have resisted it, but the puppet strings were invisible and weightless. The manipulation had no real avatar but the occasional visit of the monster that had disappeared as he rolled down the slope into the rushing water.

Steve had never been coddled, while his brother grew up in the warm arms of a mother and father and always had someone to ask for guidance. The cast-off child of destiny had been alone. He had carved his own way through the world. He had never been helped; no, he had been brutally abandoned as a duck among swans and forced to act of his volition to find his own righteousness.

The water pulled at his shirt and numbed his hands and he let go as irrationality moved him to flail his blade weakly at his brother-friend-rival. The numbness was overpowering as the water pulled him down and he relaxed, for the first time in years feeling completely unperturbed as his life and his blood ebbed away from his body. A dying thought, recorded for posterity? _Life_, it seems, _is not particularly fair. _


End file.
